Daddys-to-be: Tom Daley and husband Dustin Lance Black don’t know which of them is their baby’s biological father
Olympic swimmer Tom Daley has confirmed that neither himself nor his husband Dustin Lance Black know which of them is the biological father of their unborn child.
The couple were able to conceive the baby boy, who Daley revealed is due in June, through “an egg donor” and surrogate mother.
“We found an egg donor and we are the sperm donors, we have fertilised half the eggs each,” Daley said in an interview with The Times. “We put in a boy embryo and a girl embryo and we don’t know whose is whose.”
Gretchen Rossi, former cast member of the Real Housewives of Orange County, is opening up about her IVF story, the struggles of getting pregnant and more in a brand new interview.
“Many celebrities in Hollywood glamorize the ability to have babies way up into your late 40s and the truth is that some of them are not telling the full story,” Rossi told PEOPLE. “A lot of women in their 40s are getting pregnant using an egg donor and not disclosing this. This is why we find it important to encourage women who are either career-focused or think they can just get pregnant way into their 40s to consider freezing their eggs while they are younger.”
Gretchen and her long-time man Slade Smiley are currently working with Dr. Surrey at SCRC, who she says has been “giving us hope.” She added, “We are awaiting the outcome of our last IVF cycle to find out if we have any viable embryos in order to implant and hopefully become pregnant.”
Gretchen Rossi is determined to expand her family.
The former Real Housewives of Orange County star recently opened up to PEOPLE about her and fiancé Slade Smiley‘s journey toward having children together via in vitro fertilization.
“Many celebrities in Hollywood glamorize the ability to have babies way up into your late 40s and the truth is that some of them are not telling the full story,” says Rossi, 39.
Hayley Gumble, 25, was diagnosed with a rare condition which causes a woman’s ovaries not to work properly and often results in infertility, two years ago.
The nursery nurse, who grew up in a foster family and has always dreamed of being a mum, was left devastated by the news after suffering two miscarriages.
Doctors said her condition – premature ovarian failure (POF) – meant she only had a five per cent chance of conceiving.
But determined not to take the news lying down, Hayley decided to try a course of IVF on the NHS.
Hayley, of Stevenage, Herts, said: “I am so desperate to be a mother and have a child with my husband.”
Egg donation is an inspiring act where a female donor generously helps another woman to fulfill her dream to become a mother.
Barcelona , — Unfortunately, there are many couples who are unable to conceive and have children on their own. Studies show that about a third of infertility cases are due to female infertility, another third to male sterility, and the rest are due to issues affecting both partners, from which many cases simply remain an unresolved mystery. Everyday Health reports that infertility affects about 10 percent of women, with possible issues resulting from ovulatory disfunction, poorly functioning fallopian tubes and uterus abnormalities.
This image shows the first sign of successful in vitro fertilization. (Oregon Health & Science University)
I got the truth when I was 16: My mother hadn’t gotten pregnant by an ex-boyfriend. I was, rather, the product of a completely intentional transaction. My father was an anonymous sperm donor.
My mom conceived me on her own at a time when it wasn’t in vogue to do so, and she didn’t tell her siblings or parents what she’d done. The revelation hit me deeply. An introverted, introspective teen, I internalized her decision to hide the truth as my own shame — shame I still feel today.
A gay father of twins has revealed that he and his partner paid a total of $171,000 to have to have the children via a surrogate.
Speaking to The Cut as part of its How I Got This Baby series, a 36-year-old man named Brad from Indiana detailed the lengths he and his husband had to go to when they decided to have children.
Six months after they got married, the couple started the process of finding an egg donor even though Brad initially thought adoption was the only way he could even becoming a dad.
The high cost of assisted reproductive treatment in North America is forcing many US citizens to look to other countries for high-quality medical care at a lower cost.
Fertty International. A modern clinic, for new models of the family (PRNewsfoto/Fertty International)
In 2016, nearly 1.4 million Americans travelled outside the U.S. in search of medical treatment, compared to 750,000 in 2008. Currently, medical tourism, or cross border reproductive care as the media have labelled it, is rising by 25% per year.
The primary reasons for these trips, according to a study conducted by the Task Force on Ethics and Law from the ESHRE, and published in the scientific journal Human Reproduction (Shenfield et al. 2010), is the difficulty in accessing certain treatments due to legal restrictions, long waiting lists, and thirdly, the search for high-quality reproductive treatment.
The main countries hosting these medical tourists in Europe are Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Switzerland, Slovenia and Spain. The fact that the latter has the most permissive legislation in terms of assisted reproduction, together with the European regulations on mobilisation of biological samples, and high medical and technical quality make Spain the top destination. It is also the country with the most egg donations.
A 60-year-old woman delivers a healthy baby in Hanoi in mid-February, thanks to an egg donor.
She hit menopause several years ago but did not give up on her dream of motherhood.
A Vietnamese woman has given birth to a healthy child at the age of 60, making her the oldest woman in the country to become a mother.
The woman, named only as Ngan, hit menopause several years ago after struggling for a long time to have a baby. She and her husband eventually decided to resort to IVF, using donated eggs and her husband’s sperm.
The baby was born in mid-February via C-section and weighing 2.6 kilograms, and has been given extra formula milk as Ngan cannot produce enough.
The dramatic growth of the databases is raising ethical challenges for the donor conception community. It has been recognised for some time that donor anonymity can no longer be guaranteed but this hypothetical threat is now very much a reality.
Donor conceived individuals are using genetic genealogy databases to match with genetic relatives and identify their biological parents, and there have been many success stories. There are now also a number of cases where people have accidentally discovered that they were donor conceived after taking a commercial DNA test. Some families who have used the services of a fertility clinic have learnt through DNA testing that the clinic owner substituted his own sperm for that of the father (see BioNews 931).
Traditional methods aren’t typically available for queer people to grow their families, and growing families non-traditionally can be expensive. What are the options and costs for queer couples and individuals to consider when family planning?
3 Questions Queer People Should Ask Before Growing Our Families – photo by Shutterstock
The cost to raise a child from birth to 18 years old, not including family planning or college, is estimated by the USDA to be about $245,340. For many LGBT families, this is the minimum cost. This is why lack of financial planning when family planning could put queer families at financial risk.
One woman’s messy path to motherhood via egg donation.
Where did your son get those beautiful, inky-black eyes?” asked my new friend Janet, a mom from my son’s preschool class.
“I don’t know, actually,” I said with practiced nonchalance. “We don’t share any genes. I used an egg donor.”
Janet looked away from me, gazing at the ground as she absorbed this information, before stammering, “Oh, I didn’t realize that.”
In the awkward silence that followed, I could practically hear the questions spinning in her brain. This has happened countless times since my son’s birth four years ago. People teetering on the brink, wondering if it’s okay to ask questions or if they should pretend I hadn’t just revealed a deep personal truth: I’m infertile; I used an egg donor.
Lauren is a 29-year-old virgin. Oh, and she’s pregnant.
Lauren decided to skip sex and use sperm from a donor to have her first child and it worked. She is expecting her baby, who will likely be named after a character in Game of Thrones, in June. “People know I’m single and having a kid by myself,” Lauren said in an interview with VICE. “But they don’t necessarily know the virgin part of it.”
Lauren is very comfortable with her “virgin” label and doesn’t seem to want to change that anytime soon, maybe never. Part of the reason she’s not in any rush to get laid is due to the gland disorder she has had all her life. “I was born with hypopituitarism, which means my pituitary gland is not formed properly,” Lauren explained to VICE. “It doesn’t send the right hormonal messages to the other glands in the body, like the adrenaline gland or the ovaries.”
Douglas Graneto (left) and Wear Culvahouse (right) with their 8-year-old daughter Katie (middle).
GREENWICH — When Wear Culvahouse, a Greenwich obstetrician-gynecologist, delivered a baby for the first male same-sex parents at Greenwich Hospital in 2004, he saw doors opening for himself as well.
The team assembled to to help the male couple included personnel from labor and delivery, the nursery and administration. They set up two rooms at Greenwich Hospital: One for the new fathers to learn how to bathe, feed and change their baby, and one for their surrogate to recover.